Don't expect to find irradiated spinach and lettuce in your supermarket any metre soon, even though federal regulators have given the food industry permission to sell it.
But most U.S. irradiation facilities treat medical products, and only a handful are set up for food. That means processors volition have to pay to ship raise hundreds of miles to be irradiated � losing precious shelf life in the process, Gombas says.
Foodmakers could build irradiation facilities. But they'd cost millions of dollars � a big look for a technology that's been largely shunned by consumers.
"You'll see gradual adoption and early adopters � who convert others to try," says Richard Hunter, CEO of Food Technology Service, a 13-employee food-irradiation company in Florida that's considered a food-irradiation leader but which relies on medical devices for 70% of its revenue.
Historically, high radiation doses used to kill all bacteria on fruits or vegetables have produced unpalatable products, researchers say.
But testing by the U.S. Department of Agriculture has shown that treating spinach and lettuce with relatively humbled radiation kills 99.9% to 99.99% of E. coli and is slightly less successful against salmonella, says Brendan Niemira, a investigator at the Microbial Food Safety Research Unit of the USDA-ARS Eastern Regional Research Center in Pennsylvania.
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